Greetings everyone. been lurking for quite a while. this is my first post.Long story, short. I purchased a guy’s lumber collection. Hopefully I didn’t make a mistake. 7 pickup loads and a trailer load. most is exotic. I can only identify about 30%.

How does one identify lumber? I looked quite a bit on the www. There doesn’t seem to be a dichotomous key for wood. hobbithouse seems the best so far, but still difficult to take a piece of lumber and get a definitive answer.

I bought a couple of books, but they are really for identification, they are more like encyclopedias,

any thoughts?

thanks for the great resource. I could look at the project section for hours.

Hobbit house definitely helps. That has been the best resource for me. One thing that has also helped me is working with a different wood for pretty much every project. Once you work with a wood for a few weeks, you kind of get the feel for it, and can pretty much identify it from then on. That works great for domestics, but can be harder with exotics.

Thanks everyone for the kind and encouraging words. I appreciate it. I will definitely post some picks of the haul and mystery woods. I don’t think this qualifies as a “Wood Gloat” because I paid quite a bit for it. (my whole emergency fund, with wifey’s approval of course). But I hope it was a good deal for me and the seller.

OK great. here is the first mystery,..... the gentleman I bought it from said it was “Calvea” from Costa Rica. It is clamshell molding. I couldn’t find Calvea anywhere. It looked meranti to me. On a return trip, I mentioned that to him. he said it wasn’t meranti and it was definitely from costa rica and the local name was Calvea but he couldn’t remember the latin name.here are some pics: